How to Better Source and Secure Web Design Clients

Kyle Prinsloo at UXDX Community: Freelancer and Agency Growth. Video: https://youtu.be/dyn4kGHkfjs

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

About me, and why clients come first

[00:00:07] Let me just get straight into it, because it's a big topic and I'm known to get to the point of things. So hopefully I can cover this topic well and then answer any questions thereafter. I'm talking about how to source and secure web design clients.

[00:00:25] About me: I've been freelancing since 2015, full-time since 2017. Just like Brad, I've also got a community. It's called freelancefam.com, and that's for web designers looking to become freelancers or eventually agency owners. We've got people starting from zero all the way to earning over $100,000 a month. It's an incredible community. It's free as well, so I would highly recommend that you take a look if that's what you're interested in.

[00:00:52] I've also got a SaaS, Client Manager. I do content videos on YouTube. I've got a podcast, thefreelancepodcast.com. I've got a wife, and I've got a baby coming soon, probably in the next few weeks or so. So that's about me. Now let's get into the meat of this presentation.

[00:01:11] And this is what we are actually going to be discussing. By "we" I mean I. Pretty briefly, it's going to be getting clients from SEO, cold outreach, Google Maps, and then we're going to open it up into the Q&A with Brad and with Catherine. The reason I chose these three is because I believe that it's actually my top three ways to get clients.

[00:01:35] And as Brad also mentioned, he mentioned about clients and cash. So I've sort of circled that, starred it and put emphasis on it. And I always say that without clients you don't have a freelancing business, you have a hobby. It's nice to focus on the animations and a pretty logo and everything, but they don't pay the bills, and you're running a business. You're not an NGO or a non-profit. So I think that's important as we get started.

Getting clients from SEO

[00:02:03] So let's talk about getting clients from SEO. And what do I mean by SEO? This is if someone types in a targeted search term that can result in more clients, you want your website to show up on Google.

[00:02:19] Some examples may be if someone types in "Editor X developer," "web design in X city," "web design for X niche," "marketing agency in X city," "marketing agency for X niche," and "SEO for X niche." In other words, the services that you are offering and what you are representing.

[00:02:39] I hope you can see this on the screen. An example would be "web designer for photographers." And these examples that I highlighted here, you'll see Photography Web Design with Grace and all of these examples. This is just the first page. And this is the takeaway from this picture: these websites get free leads and ultimately free clients every single month.

[00:03:11] And very important, why is this? Because they were intentional about SEO. This does not just happen when you just put a website up there. You have to be intentional about SEO, ranking it on Google.

[00:03:26] So here's the pro tip for you: create landing pages for targeted searches, just like I mentioned, "Editor X developer" and so on. So if we look at an example, startupstarship.com. This is actually an agency that I'm building in public, and I've announced some stuff on Twitter. I'm not going to get into too much detail on it. But basically here's my plan from an SEO perspective. I'm going to follow this advice because it's worked for me in previous businesses, it's worked for me for a lot of clients, and I know it works.

[00:03:58] So I'm going to do "Editor X developer." This is a dedicated page focused on, if someone types in "Editor X developer," I want my website, Startup Starship, to show for those terms. And I want it to be valuable, with calls to action and everything. Someone types in "agency for SaaS," which is a niche that I want to focus on, I want my website and agency to show for it. "SEO for psychologist," I don't want to show for that, but it's just an example.

[00:04:27] So all of these things. I might have like five pages, or maybe 10 or 20 even, but it's targeted pages, and it very simply results in more leads and ultimately more clients.

[00:04:43] Now, this is by no means a presentation on how SEO works and the technical aspect. This is very much a high-level SEO strategy. I would recommend that you learn SEO, and two resources that I can recommend are Wix — they've got a fantastic intro and everything that explains it well, I even just signed up to a webinar on SEO literally before this call — and Backlinko, a fantastic resource on SEO. So with any of these resources you'll be set to go with applying SEO for not only clients, but also offering it as a service to clients.

Cold outreach: what it is, and cold email

[00:05:26] Now, hope you're still with me so far. Getting clients from outreach. What is outreach? It's all the activities to proactively reach out to people in the hope that they will become a client. And don't fact check me, because I didn't use ChatGPT or anything to get these descriptions. I just winged it, what made sense to me.

[00:05:53] Okay, so cold outreach in my mind includes cold email, social media, Google rankings, and Google Maps. These are my top favorite ones. There are other ones which you can do, like cold calls and things. That's not really my strong point, so I'm not going to discuss that now. I'm only going to be talking about cold email, social media, Google rankings and Google Maps, and I'm going to be cognizant of time, because we don't have a two or three hour course here.

[00:06:21] So, cold emails. Very simply, you start with a list of leads, you email those leads, you convince those prospects or leads to sign up to your services, and then they either sign up or don't. That's cold email.

[00:06:36] So if we expand on this a bit more, step one is the leads. And I like a tool called findthatlead.com. There are plenty of different platforms and websites that you can gather these leads from. And essentially what you can do on this website and tool is you search for the leads, but you can filter it via niche. So let's say you're focusing on architects or plumbers or lawyers or whatever, you can do that. And then you can filter via city or company or size and a whole lot of other different filters. And in terms of this tool, it is a premium tool, but what you can do is you can sign up to the monthly plan, if you don't have the cash, and then get your list of 1,000 or 2,000 leads, and then that should be good enough for you to start from. So that's step one.

[00:07:23] Step two is we want to email those leads. So again, plenty of tools that you can use to do this. I recommend Lemlist. And essentially what this does is it automates the process with follow-ups, and you can get helpful analytics data. So with the follow-ups, you want to send an email and you want to have an automated follow-up, if they don't open it, or if they open it and don't reply, and all of these things. Otherwise it can get quite messy if you have to do it manually. But if you don't have the cash to do that, manually does work.

[00:07:58] Step three is we want to convince the prospects and leads to become clients. So this is very important, that we should re-look and test the email. And I recommend that you send 100 emails with version A and then another 100 emails with version B, and then you use the best version. But it's very, very important that you keep testing and improving.

[00:08:23] So as an example, I'm just going to zoom in here quickly. It says: "Hope you're safe. My name is Kyle. I'm reaching out to you because I see a few opportunities to improve your website. We recently helped X client generate an additional X monthly bookings worth X amount with similar changes. If you would like, I can send you a short video going through my suggestions, or schedule a call. Let me know if you're interested." So that's the content that we want to focus on.

[00:08:53] Please do not send an email saying, "Hey, I will do a website for cheap, or for a good price." Don't do that. You want to make it targeted as much as possible and you want to make it very helpful. The other thing is, as I'm going to touch on some other outreach strategies, it's very, very important that this is very much an example. The point of me adding this in is not so that you can use it verbatim. It's so that you can edit it and customize it, but that you don't overthink it, because very often the correct email would be straight to the point. Whereas... actually, wait, I'm going to get to it in the social outreach. I don't want to get too carried away, it's just a very cool topic I'm interested in.

Social media outreach, and qualified versus cold leads

[00:09:37] So, social media outreach. This is when you send a message to a prospective client on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

[00:09:52] As we're talking about outreach, I do want to pause here and really illustrate and talk about the differences. So we've got qualified leads and we've got cold leads. Qualified leads are essentially your ideal clients. You've researched their needs and you've perhaps even interacted with them. Maybe you've liked a comment on LinkedIn, or you followed them on Twitter, or you engaged with them or something like that. That's the ideal. It requires more effort, however you get a much better success rate. Then on the other hand we've got cold leads, and that's general filtering. You haven't really researched them, you've definitely not interacted with them. It's much less effort, but you will get a much lower success rate.

[00:10:36] So now moving on to the social. This is an example DM. You would say something like: "Hi John, my name is Kyle from Startup Starship. I looked at your website and noticed a few improvements you can make. I was wondering if I could send you a quick video with my suggestions."

[00:10:50] So just circling back to the other part, one message that works incredibly well is, instead of asking them to do it, you just do it. So you would head over to their website and you would record a two to three minute Loom video with your suggestions. And you would say, "Hi John, I just went through your website. Here are my suggestions on how you could improve your landing page to hopefully get more results. Don't feel obligated to do anything, but if you would like me to help you, I can help you with X, Y, Z. All the best." That type of message takes much longer to make, maybe 10, 15, 20 minutes. But the thing is, if you had to do a hundred of those versus a thousand cold emails, I can guarantee you that a hundred of those targeted messages like that will get a much better response.

Google Maps: finding businesses you can actually improve

[00:11:39] So, moving on to Google Maps. This is what you search for on Google. You will type something like "service in X city" or "X near me" as an example. We've got landscapers, painters, architects, brick pavers, deck installers, storage facilities. Then we've got florists, optometrists, pain removal[?], dentists, electricians, garage door installers. A lot of different things. So use this as an example if you really don't know how to get started with this.

[00:12:15] So the strategy is the following. Let's say we type in "landscapers in Dallas." What we want to do is we want to look at the Google Maps. And there are essentially two strategies here, we want to look at two things. We want to look at the reviews, and we want to look at their website. I don't have a video showing this, but if you were to click "more businesses" it'll expand onto maybe 20 or 50 or 100 of these different Google Maps listings. And that's where you look for the reviews and then the websites. Even here in this example, you'll click on their websites. And I'm going to show you now what we are looking for.

[00:12:50] Essentially what we want to do is we want to see where we can make improvements. If we can't make any improvements, don't reach out to them. They're not an ideal client. So we're looking for bad design, bad SEO, bad call to action, bad copy, and maybe some technical issues. Maybe it's not mobile responsive, or maybe it takes forever to load, or some other technical issues.

[00:13:14] And this can be a big topic. I do have a video on this topic, it's about 20 minutes long, on web design tips. But that's if you really struggle with this type of thing. Essentially it's the whole thinking of, in order to be able to know what is bad, we need to know what is good. In order to give suggestions, we need to know what is bad. And sort of that whole dichotomy. So it's very important to learn and to improve knowledge on creating effective websites. I also recommend CRO, conversion rate optimization. You can just Google that and just learn something on YouTube. Incredibly helpful to know.

[00:13:55] So as an example, if you want to reach out by email, specifically let's say the Google reviews, what I like is I like using the competitors as a benchmark. So I would say something like: "I'm not sure if you're aware, but your Google rating of 3.5 is much lower than your competitors. My name is Kyle from Startup Starship. We help businesses just like yours improve their ratings and websites to get more clients. We recently helped X, Y and Z get more bookings. If you're interested, I'd love to chat." So again, that's an example. There's plenty of different ways and different approaches around it, but don't overthink it. This is just an example that you can use.

[00:14:35] And also very important, this strategy also works for Google rankings. I'm not going to go into the detail because it's essentially an exact duplicate from the Google Maps one. In this case we're not looking at reviews, we're just looking at the website. But what I like about this strategy, in this case I just typed in "deck installers in Dallas," and what I'm going to look at is two things. I'm going to look at the website and I'm going to look at the SEO. So if I can make any suggestions on the website and SEO, I'm going to do it, and I see that as an opportunity where I can offer my services.

[00:15:09] But very important, I don't want to be focusing on the businesses, let's say, on the top three ranking on the first page of Google. I want to focus on the businesses who are ranking at the bottom of the first page or the top of the second page. Those are ideal prospects that you want to target.

Takeaways: follow up, qualify, build a brand, adapt

[00:15:26] So, I'm going to wrap up with some takeaways that I think are very, very important when it comes to outreach. Follow up. I can't say this enough, but most leads and prospects will not say yes the first time around. Very often it requires a third, a fourth or a fifth follow up. And there are good lessons during the process, because I think Brad mentioned, every no gets you closer to a yes, or something like that. So it's a good thing, and you can learn from the process as well.

[00:15:56] The second one is qualify leads. I always say that 100 — and I mentioned it earlier — 100 qualified leads are much better than 1,000 cold leads. Spend the extra time, I can guarantee you it is worth it.

[00:16:09] Thirdly, get active building a brand. Highly, highly recommend this. It might require stepping out of your comfort zone, sort of failing as you go, but I highly recommend it. Good opportunities come when you do that.

[00:16:23] Fourth is try different approaches. There are many ways to skin this one, many different ways. You don't even have to do the strategies that I mentioned. You could prefer, let's say, cold calls, or you could do maybe Google Ads or Facebook Ads or things like that. Many ways to do it. Finally, it is adapt and improve.

[00:16:48] And in terms of the start, I just highlighted that. I think it's so important: start with what you know and learn as you go. Please do not overcomplicate it. It can get very overwhelming if you consider advanced strategies.

[00:17:03] But as an example, when I started freelancing I barely knew HTML and CSS, and I started selling that as a service, and I figured it out as I went. The first few times when I was trying to pitch my services I would get very nervous, start shaking, talking to prospects like that, and I could have easily given up. So yeah, I want to encourage you that you can do this.

[00:17:29] And that is it. Thank you. If you are interested, once again, I do have a community, freelancefam.com. Would love to see you there. Any questions, I'm sure that Catherine is going to take it over. So that's it from our side now. Thank you so much.